Tuesday, January 29, 2013

This book has been five years in the making, and now I am finally in a position to finish the job and put a copy directly in your hands. I will even sign it. I have contracted with a fulfillment center to promptly ship out copies of The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit as soon as they come off the press in early May. By popular demand, I have also added an option to let you order an autographed, numbered copy, for a little extra. The book will eventually filter out to various online bookstores and maybe even a few actual real ones, but it will take a few months for that to happen, and half a year or so until a few of your dollars trickle down to me. But if you pre-order the book directly from me, then I get paid first, and in return I will personally see to it that your copy is included in the very first print run and that you get it in May. Your direct support is very important: it is what will allow me to continue blogging and writing books. Thank you.

Please note: Although the order is placed through PayPal, you don't need to have a PayPal account; just click "Don't have a PayPal Account?" during check-out and enter a credit or debit card number. Also, please make extra-double-sure that the shipping address associated with your PayPal account is up-to-date and correct, and will remain that way through May. If you do submit an order with an incorrect address, write to me and I will issue a refund so you that can resubmit it.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Starting next Tuesday and for the next
three months this book will be available for pre-order right on this blog. (It will also be available elsewhere,
but on terms that don't come close to making book-writing a
sustainable proposition, so if you want me to keep writing you should
get the book directly from me.) As the publication date nears, I will
also be publishing some excerpts. [Minor note: there has been some
confusion regarding the book's subtitle; please ignore it.]

This book is based on the identically titled article I published on this blog in February
of 2008, just as financial collapse was starting to gather steam.
Since then, this article has been read nearly 100,000 times on this
blog alone (it has been reposted on many other web sites) and it is
its enduring popularity that has convinced me to write a book-length
treatment.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

A few days ago I went to the St. Petersburg
State Hermitage, again, this time to see a rather extraordinary
exhibit. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a work by Jake and Dinos
Chapman, two English artists. Titled The End of Fun, it is an
elaborate tableau of hell, carved up into nine rectangular
sub-tableaux, each piece placed in a glass case. (It is a recreation
of a previous work, titled Hell, which was lost in a warehouse
fire.) The glass cases are, in turn, arranged in the shape of a
swastika. The effect of viewing each one is like that of peering into
a terrarium in some sort of menagerie where the animals—at
the time the clock stopped—were busy torturing and
killing each other in maximally cruel and unusual, highly ritualized
and choreographed ways.

Friday, January 11, 2013

In this interview, recorded late last year, I discuss the differences in orientation between Russia, which is changing perhaps too swiftly, and the US, which remains stuck in the past. I also talk about community, and about lack of it, and what it means to live among people who insist on their right to remain strangers and who expect nothing from each other or their public officials. I also mention the force behind American political and social stasis: the desperate wish for a future that resembles the past—the American equivalent of Soviet nostalgia.

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

During my brief winter sojourn in
Russia a tiny cold war has erupted between Russia and the USA. First,
Mitt Romney calls Russia “our number one enemy” during the
presidential election campaign. Then, after the election, the US
passes the “Magnitsky Act” which promises to arrest funds and
deny visas to certain Russian officials based on a secret list. The
Russian legislature then responds with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,”
named after a Russian boy who died of heat stroke after his American
adoptive parents left him locked in a car for nine hours. In addition
to vaguely symmetric retaliatory measures, this bill bans Americans
from adopting Russian orphans. This last little add-on may initially
seem rather daft as state policy, but it has some interesting
properties as Russian propaganda, of which you may not be aware.
Although from the US perspective this move has an inane “...or I
will shoot my dog” element to it, spun around the other way it
makes it look as if valiant Russian politicians are trying to stop
American fiends from torturing and killing innocent Russian orphans.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

It's the first of the year, which is a
traditional time for prognosticators to do some prognosticating.
Since I have already explained
at length why it is quite possible to accurately predict that something will
eventually happen, but near-impossible to predict when it will happen (due
to total lack of relevant data on which to base such predictions) I
won't repeat myself here. Nor will I offer any predictions as to the
timing of various stages of collapse. (I know that the USA will
collapse politically, financially and commercially, but I don't know
when; nor does anyone else.) Instead, I would like to point out what I think is unlikely to
happen in 2013: I find it unlikely that this will be the year when
the various elites running the show here (elected and unelected
officials, academic authorities, corporations, think-tanks, mass media, etc.) will admit defeat: “The financial collapse of
2008 was the end of an era. What came before cannot be brought back.
We have been pretending that it can be brought back for half a decade, but now we
give up. Let's let the whole house of cards fall down, so that we can
start over.” Do you see any of them rising up and saying something
like that? I don't.